Tag Archives: Software

The following article is brought to you by Netspysoftware, and does not represent the opinions of OhGizmo.com or its staff. -Ed.

Have you ever had any concerns as to what is going on with your child or even if your partner is cheating on you? Do they appear to be spending a lot of time on their phone and acting secretive about it? If so, then using Netspysoftware may actually be a very good idea. This piece of cell phone spyware will allow you to learn so much about that phone that it will either answer questions you may have or at least give you some peace of mind. However, what else is there to know about this piece of software?

Sometimes, all you need to see is another smiling face to turn your own frown upside down. That concept works even more if it’s your own smiling face that you’re seeing. I don’t mean an old photo of yourself; rather, I’m talking about a smiling image of your face in real-time.

This is made possible by the “Emotion Evoking System” that was developed by Shigeo Yoshida and other researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies.

Between the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone, there’s a fair amount of choice on the market. But if all this seems boring to you, you might want to look at what Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is cooking up. They’re looking to raise $32 million on Indiegogo, in order to develop a handset called Edge. Quite frankly, it just looks awesome:

Crafted from cool, textured amorphous metal, the Edge has a distinctive, precise look but its rakishly chamfered edges are shaped to fit naturally in the palm — our design prototype already has a wonderfully solid feel. It’s the right size, too. Edge gestures are the next big thing in mobile, and our testing has found that a 4.5in screen is ideal for comfortable control of all four edges with one hand.

We also believe the race for ever higher resolution has become a distraction. Beyond 300ppi you’re adding overhead rather than improving display clarity. We think colour, brightness and dynamic range are now the edge of invention so we’ll choose a display for its balance of resolution, dynamic range and colour accuracy.

We’ll protect that gorgeous display with something vastly tougher than glass: pure sapphire crystal, a material so hard only diamond could scratch it. For a phone to run a full desktop OS, it must have the raw power of a PC. We’ll choose the fastest available multi-core processor, at least 4GB of RAM and a massive 128GB of storage. The battery will use silicon-anode technology, so we can squeeze more energy into the same dimensions.

So how much? The $600 early adopter version is sold out. So the only way to get one is to pledge $830. That may seem steep, but you’re paying for a phone that could double as a PC. That sounds pretty sweet to us, and look at that if it isn’t a thing of beauty…

If you can’t go anywhere without checking in on Foursquare, then you might find the Time Machine helpful in tracing and mapping out every place you’ve visited in the past few months. It’s basically a data visualization tool that uses your check-in data to create a colorful map with the places you’ve been to pointed out by bright orbs.

You can zoom in to each point on the map so you can see where it is and when you visited that location. The background music sets the tone for your past adventures, and you can easily share the graphic with your network using the tool.

There’s very little chance you missed the news that’s plastered everywhere, but just in case, here it is: Apple officially pulled the wraps off its next iteration of iOS at WWDC yesterday. Yes, come September, iOS 7 will be ready to load up on your devices. Facing stiff competition from Samsung, HTC and others, it was about time the Cupertino boys revamped at least the software behind their famous cash cows. Here’s an overview of the notable new features.

You can tell a lot about a person and his or her moods based on their tweets. Mathematicians Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds and scientists from the University of Vermont and the Mitre Corporation are well aware of that fact and have been working to gauge the world’s happiness based on the Twitter feeds of worldwide users since 2008.

They’ve collaborated to builda a piece of software called the Hedonometer which uses information pulled from Twitter Garden Hose to determine the world’s current happiness level.

How many times have you face palmed while watching a show like CSI because of technicians magically “enhancing” an image, somehow finding digital information where there clearly isn’t any? Well it turns out that if software designed by one Vladimir Yuzhikov works as advertised, we might have been wrong to laugh. It’s called SmartDeblur and it uses some pretty advanced mathematical algorithms to try and minimize blur that comes from three sources: shots that are out of focus, shots that were taken while moving and something called gaussian blur, which Wikipedia assures us is different than the other two. But as they say, the proof is in the pudding and the image you see above was restored using this very application. Color us impressed.

Matter of fact, it gets better. Not only are there quite a few more such shots for you to look at after the break, there’s also a link to download Vladimir’s software! Yes, it’s free and as long as you have a PC, you can go ahead and try and save all those shots that you thought were ruined forever. It won’t produce images that are as sharp as a proper picture, but hey, this is some cool tech right here. Also after the jump, a link to a detailed explanation of what’s actually going on here. Math-phobes might want to abstain.

You’re at an Internet cafe and you’re surrounded by a ton of WiFi networks. You got your phone in your pocket, which has a 4G connection. And there’s an Ethernet cable if you don’t want to use any of the hotspots. Normally, you’d pick one of these and download as fast as that one lets you. But what if you could combine all of them and create one super connection? Connectify’s Dispatch software lets you do exactly that. You can even combine several WiFi connections into one, by purchasing a secondary USB WiFi card (or getting a free one if you pledge more than $100). Whether it’s your 4G/3G tethered cellular device, along with another WiFi connection, with a dial-up to boot, you can easily double or even triple your download speeds. The program features a cost-awareness feature that can set priorities for Internet connections so that more expensive connections like 3G/4G will only be used when cheap or free connections become slow or disconnect.

It’s brilliant, only it’s not quite available. It’s on Kickstarter and needs some more funding. $40 pledges gets you the software, while $65 gets you early access to it. Bump that up to $100 and you’ve got the complimentary USB WiFi card as well as a T-Shirt.

That headline has a hint of sarcasm in it, for sure, because… since when is more noise a good thing, right? But it’s not completely untrue either. There’s a certain nostalgia in hearing the sounds of typewriters of old, at least for those of us ancient enough to remember them. In my particular case, I was maybe 5 or 6 years old the last time there was one in my house, and watching the above video instantly brought back memories from back then. In the video you’ll see an Apple device running this piece of free software that works in all applications (email, web, word, etc.) and makes authentic sounds of “letter keys, spacebar, backspace, carriage return and scroll up and down.” It has no other purpose, nor does it need one. It works on OS X only for now.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.